So a Comic Sits Down to Write a Book ...

Tina Fey has created what is arguably the best network television comedy of the last decade, “30 Rock,” and has worked on hit movies like “Mean Girls.” But where her influence might loom largest is, believe it or not, books.

“Bossypants,” her 2011 memoir, isn’t just a commercial success or a critical darling. It’s a blockbuster, a staple of the New York Times best-seller list (27 weeks on the hardcover list; 19 and counting on the paperback one). But its impact can’t be measured solely in numbers.

Comedy has become a growing and diverse publishing genre. Published this week was “The Lowbrow Reader Reader,” an excellent anthology of a 10-year-old comedy zine, and essays by the comedian Dave Hill called “Tasteful Nudes: ... And Other Misguided Attempts at Personal Growth and Validation.” The first week in June brings “I Hate Everyone ... Starting With Me,” an encyclopedia of kvetches by Joan Rivers, with more punch lines per paragraph than any book I’ve read in years.

But the most popular literary form in comedy is the memoir, perfectly suited for beach and bathroom reads. These are typically around 250 breezy pages that mix “Can you believe I’m writing a book?” jokes with shoptalk and self-deprecating confessions. The ambitions are somewhere between a long magazine piece and a talk show interview.

What made “Bossypants” a book likely to be imitated is its seemingly effortless balance of genuine insight with candid personal vignettes. It’s light comedy without guilt, which is much harder to pull off than it looks.

Mindy Kaling’s “Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)” and Rachel Dratch’s “Girl Walks into a Bar ...“ work off the same template. Like “Bossypants,” they both have short, punchy chapters; adorable kid photos; and an excess of parenthetical punch lines. They zip from a comedy-nerd origin story to visions of New York and tales of dating nightmares.

Ms. Kaling (a writer and star of “The Office”) divides bachelors into boys and men, while Ms. Dratch (best known as Debbie Downer on “Saturday Night Live”) separates nice guys from “the Fonzies,” but the arc of discovering which ones to pursue is the same.

The main difference is one of style. Ms. Dratch maintains a blunt, irreverent and gently jaded posture, partly because of experience. She was originally cast as Jenna in “30 Rock” but was replaced with Jane Krakowski after the pilot, and her grappling with this missed opportunity carries an understandable edge.

“I felt confident that Tina had ‘fought’ for me as much as she saw fit,” she writes. Ms. Dratch played a variety of characters in the show’s first season but was eventually phased out.

She is only in her 40s, but her book, which moves from tales of Second City and “Saturday Night Live” to an exploration of motherhood, convinces you that she has seen enough to justify a show business memoir. Ms. Dratch was part of a golden age of improv, working in Chicago in the mid-’90s with Ms. Fey, Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Adam McKay and Amy Poehler. That she did not rise along with her peers might allow her to tell a more unvarnished story.

By contrast, Ms. Kaling’s star is on the rise (her sitcom, “The Mindy Project,” will have its premiere next season on Fox), and while The New Yorker ran an excerpt from her book (as it did Ms. Fey’s), a dynamite chapter dissecting the romantic comedy genre, her personal musings appear cautious, dutiful, even bland.

Despite her book’s title, Ms. Kaling does not seem like a bundle of insecurities. She comes off as confident and well adjusted, with loving immigrant parents and supportive friends, but still in awe of show business. She even calls the divey East Village landmark Performance Space 122, where she was hilarious in her breakthrough play, “Matt & Ben,” a “beautiful theater.”

The contrasting ways these writers praise Ms. Poehler (once again, in a precedent set by “Bossypants”) is revealing. Ms. Dratch imagines a call from her agent offering her a role to play a mutant, lesbian mother to a superhero played by Ms. Poehler. She takes the part.

Ms. Kaling, who briefly worked for “SNL,” dedicates way too much space to gushing. In her eyes Ms. Poehler is a “popular, pretty genius” who is “prescient” and “all-woman, all-awesome.” Ms. Poelher may be that wonderful, but the case will not be made through quantity of adjectives.

Lizz Winstead probably has a juicy story to tell. A sharp, opinionated stand-up and writer, she helped start “The Daily Show” (where she was the head writer) but left mere months before Jon Stewart replaced Craig Kilborn as host. But in “Lizz Free or Die,” she displays no bitterness or disappointment at this poor timing.

Unlike Ms. Dratch, who turns her setbacks into irreverent vignettes, Ms. Winstead skips through them. She doesn’t even explain why she left “The Daily Show” and early on she declares she’s not a “public laundry kind of gal,” which may be why she calls this a book of “essays,” as opposed to a memoir.

Yet it is basically a memoir, and she is actually searching and lively as she creates a portrait of a comic as a young woman. And she’s even moving in sketching her cantankerous but loving relationship with her right-wing father.

“I raised you to have an opinion,” he told her. “But I forgot to tell you it was supposed to be mine.”

Ms. Winstead writes with a feel for the sound of words. Periodically, she coins a term. My favorite is “awkidence,” a conflation of awkwardness and confidence developed “in the bedroom mirror of teenage girls.”

But that term could also aptly describe Michael Ian Black, the dry star of the mid-’90s MTV sketch show “The State.” His memoir, “You’re Not Doing It Right,” dispenses with show business altogether and creates a darkly funny, surprisingly eccentric midlife crisis story with a voice that will be grating to some readers.

In confident prose that is clever without feeling too worked over, Mr. Black, 40, delivers a thorough chronicle of his own failings, embarrassments and vulnerabilities. His musings feel like an insult comic turning inward. Exposing your worst impulses and insecurities is an old stand-up tactic, and at first this book can seem contrived. But Mr. Black’s commitment to his warts and all gradually earns your trust.

He says he is writing about the moments when you do not recognize your present life as your own. And in the most dramatic scenes — like the death of his father, whose corpse at the funeral is “the kind of thing God would have made in seventh grade art class” — he describes time as fluid. The book’s intricate structure supports this, unpredictably darting back and forth over the years.

His shallow dating stories give way to a fatherhood that is even more childish. He doesn’t just hate being a dad. He resents his baby, dreams of shaking him. He’s strikingly impatient, frequently thinking about divorce, concluding that one reason he couldn’t do it is that it’s too expensive. “I value happiness,” he says. “I love money.”

His coolness to his wife startles, but then again, his analysis comes off not as cheap hyperbole but as the garden-variety insanity that takes place in marital fights. Mr. Black shows something ugly but recognizable.

There’s scant redemption here. His tearful epiphany occurs in the middle, and he ends with a wedding followed by a paragraph break and “I don’t know.” It’s like a joke told out of order. His point seems to be that real life doesn’t unfold as it does in a memoir.

Correction: May 27, 2012

An earlier version of this article gave an incorrect title for a book by Mindy Kaling. It is called “Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns),” not “Is Everyone Hanging Out With Me? (And Other Concerns).”

A version of this article appears in print on May 25, 2012, on page C21 of the New York edition with the headline: So a Comic Sits Down To Write A Memoir. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe